From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-03-04T22:33:01+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:11972] Re: Not Ruby, for me, for the moment at least

Kevin Smith <sent@qualitycode.com> wrote:
>
>Michael Kreuzer wrote:
[...]
> >(1) Lua, Python and Scheme got 1 point each for being freely useable, the
> >others got 0 points for their GNU licences.
>
>Ruby-license-experts help me out here. I can
>distribute commercial (non-GPL) apps written in
>Ruby, can't I?
>
Yes.

First of all Ruby is available under a commercial
friendly Artistic license that explicitly gives
permission for embedding Ruby in commercial
programs.

Secondly even if Ruby was GPL only, consider the
following paragraph from section 0 of the GPL:

    Activities other than copying, distribution and
    modification are not covered by this License;
    they are outside its scope.  The act of running
    the Program is not restricted, and the output
    from the Program is covered only if its contents
    constitute a work based on the Program
    (independent of having been made by running the
    Program).  Whether that is true depends on what
    the Program does.

IANAL, but from that it seems clear to me that if you
produced your own script, that work is not derived
from the Ruby interpreter so nobody can stop you from
putting your own copyright on it, and the GPL in no
way prevents people from choosing to run ruby using
your script as input.  Unless you are doing something
like taking a core dump of the internal state of the
interpreter, the output would also not be covered.

See also the fact that gcc is a widely used compiler
that is GPLed but has been used to compile many
proprietary programs.  It may be that somewhere,
someone thinks it should not be used for that, but I
haven't seen people complaining...

So you are covered twice.  First of all that Ruby is
available under a non-GPL license, and secondly that
the GPL would not stop you from writing your script.

Now one obvious question, if the Artistic license on
Ruby is more permissive than the GPL, why would Ruby
need to be also available under the GPL?  Well the
way that I see it, the reason is so that people who
are working on GPLed projects can easily embed Ruby
without problems.  (The GPL has different criteria
for what you need to do if you modify the software,
and the GPLed project needs permission to give the
software away with the permissions that the GPL uses.)

Cheers,
Ben
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